Weak Interactions

Yiddish influence in Hungarian, Esperanto and

Modern Hebrew
Tams Br

When I arrived in Groningen, I was introduced to Tjeerd de Graaf as

somebody speaking Hungarian. Then it turned out that both of us were
interested in Yiddish. Furthermore, we shared the fact that we started our
scientific life within physics, although, unlike Tjeerd, I have not worked as
a physicist since my graduation. Nevertheless, as a second year physics
student I received a research question from the late leading Hungarian
physicist George Marx that was also somehow related to Tjeerds earlier
research topic, neutrino astrophysics.
Neutrinos are funny particles. They are extremely light, if they have any
mass, at all.1 Therefore, they cannot interact through gravitation. Because
they do not have any electrical charge either, electromagnetic interaction is
also unknown to them. The only way they can interact with the universe is
the so-called weak interaction, one of the four fundamental forces.2
Nowadays physicists spend an inconceivable amount of budget building
gigantic, underground basins containing millions of litres of heavy water
just to try to detect a few neutrinos per year out of the very intense stream
of neutrinos flowing constantly from the Sun and going through the Earth,
that is, us. Even though they almost never interact with regular material,
through weak interaction they play a fundamental role both in shaping what
the universe looks like and in the Suns energy production. Therefore our
life would not be possible without neutrinos and without weak interaction.
Something similar happens in ethnolinguistics. The interaction between
two languages may not always be very salient, and it cannot necessarily be
explained by the most famous types of interactions. A weak interaction in
linguistics might be an interaction which is not acknowledged by the
speakers community, for instance for ideologically reasons.
In the present paper I shall present three cases of weak interaction
between languages, understood in this sense, namely Yiddish affecting
Hungarian, Modern Hebrew (Israeli Hebrew) and Esperanto. All the stories

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take place in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, when a new or
modernized language had to be created. We shall observe what kind of
interactions took place under which conditions. A model for interactions
combined with the better understanding of the social-historical setting will
enable us to do so.

1. Language interactions within a given socio-historical setting

1.1. Modelling interactions

In physics, the interaction between two bodies depends on three factors: the
two eligibilities of the parties to interact, as well as their distance. For
gravity and electromagnetism, the formula probably familiar from highschool physics states that the force is proportional to the product of the
eligibilitiesmass or electric chargeof the two bodies, divided by the
square of their distance. In other words, the higher the two masses (or
electric charges) and the smaller the distance, the stronger the interaction.
For Newton, who formulated this formula first, gravity was a long-range
interaction. Modern physics has completed this picture with introducing
exchange particles intermediating between the interacting bodies.3 That
way, contemporary science has also incorporated the view of Newtons
opponents who argued for the only possibility of short-range interactions.
To transplant this image, vaguely, into the phenomenon of language
interaction, we have to identify the eligibilities of the two interacting
languages, their distance and the exchange particles. In fact, we can do that
even on two levels. On a purely linguistic level, one can easily point to
words and grammatical phenomenaexchange particleswandering
from language to language. But it would be harder to identify in general the
properties of the phenomena and of the given languages that make the
interaction more probable or less probable.
The sociolinguistic level is more promising for such an approach. In this
case, the human beings are the exchange particles: people who leave one
linguistic community in order to join a new one. By the very fact of their
moves, they affect their new language by a linguistic quantum. The closer
the two language communities, the more people will act as an exchange
particle. Here distance should be understood not only based on geography,

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik.

but on the intensity of the social network, as well. Thus, the more people
wander to the target community, the more linguistic impulse is brought to
the second language and therefore the stronger the interaction. Note that the
physical analogy is not complete, since the symmetry of action and reaction
is not guaranteed for interacting languages.
The three cases to be discussed share the feature that the role of the
carriers of the interaction is played by late nineteenth century Eastern
European Jews. In order to understand the historical background, we have
to recall what is called Haskala or Jewish Enlightenment.

1.2. The Haskala

By the late eighteenth century, the French and German Aufklrung had
raised the question whether to emancipate and integrateor assimilate
the Jewish population on the one side, and an increasing wish to join the
European culture on the other. Although in the second half of the sicle des
lumires there were only a few Jewish intellectuals who articulated these
ideas, most of them belonging to the circle of the philosopher Moses
Mendelssohn (1729-1786) in Berlin, the next decades witnessed the
acculturation of a growing segment of the Jewish population in the German
territories, as well as within the Austrian Empire. The eighteenth century
Berlin Haskala is called the first stage of the Jewish Enlightenment,
whereas the early nineteenth century social and cultural developments
represent its second stage.
What the first two stages of the Haskala yielded was including a Jewish
colour on the contemporary Western European cultural palette. Jewish
was understood exclusively as one possible faith within the list of European
religions, and nothing more than a religious conviction. An enlightened Jew
was supposed to fully master the educated standard variant of the language
of the society he lived in (Hochdeutsch in most of the cases), without any
Jewish -like feature. Propagating the knowledge of Hochdeutsch and
rolling back Jdischdeutsch had been already the programme of Moses
Mendelssohn when he began writing a modern targum4 of the Bible, the
Biur. Further, the same Jew was expected to fully master the contemporary
European culture, including classical languages, sciences and arts. The only
sphere in which this Jew could express his or her being Jewish was the
diminished and Europeanised arena of religious life. Diminished, because
of a secularisation of life style; and Europeanised, due to the inclusion of

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philosophical ideals of the Enlightenment together with aesthetic models of
the Romanticism. The traditional religious duty of constantly learning the
traditional texts with the traditional methods was sublimated into the
scholarly movement of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.
The picture changed dramatically in the middle of the nineteenth
century, when the Haskala, in its third stage, reached the Eastern European
Jewry, including Jews in Poland and Lithuania (under Russian
government), Eastern Hungary, and Rumania. Here the Jewish population
was far denser, whereas the surrounding society was far behind Western
Europe in the process of the social and economic development. In fact,
Jews would play an important role in the modernization of those areas.
Therefore, several people of Jewish origin could take the initiative and
invent absolutely new alternatives to the social constructs that people had
been living with so far.
One type of those social alternatives still preserved the idea of the
earlier Haskala according to which Jews should become and remain an
organic part of the universal human culture. These alternatives proposed
thus some forms of revolutionary change to the entire humankind, as was
the case in the different types of socialist movements, in which Jews
unquestionably played an important role. Esperantism also belongs here,
for its father, Ludwig Zamenhof was a Polish-Lithuanian Jew proposing an
alternative to national language as another social construct.
The second type of radical answer that Eastern European Jews gave to
the emergence of Enlightenment in the underdeveloped Eastern European
milieu was creating a new kind of Jewish society. Recall that there was a
dense Jewish population living within a society that itself did not represent
a modern model to which most Jews wished to acculturate. Different
streams of this type of answer emerged, although they did not mutually
exclude each other. Many varieties of political activism, such as early
forms of Zionism, political Zionism, territorialism or cultural autonomism,
embody one level of creating an autonomous Jewish society.
The birth of a new Jewish secular culture, including literature,
newspapers or Klezmer music is another one. The question then arose
whether the language of this new secular culture should be Yiddishand
thus a standardized, literary version of Yiddish was to be developedor
Hebrewand therefore a renewal of the Hebrew language was required. In
the beginning, this point was not such an enormous matter of dispute as it
would later develop into, when Hebraists, principally connected with
Zionism, confronted Yiddishists, generally claiming a cultural and / or

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik.

political autonomy within Eastern Europe. It is the irony of history that the
far more nave and seemingly unrealistic ideology, calling for the revival of
an almost unspoken language in the distant Palestine, was the one that later
would become reality.

1.3. Language interactions in the Haskala

Let us now return to our model of language interactions. As we have seen,
the intensity of the interaction depends on the number of exchange
particleslanguage changing individuals, that is a kind of distance
measured in the social network; furthermore on the eligibility of the
languages to transmit and to adopt features. We shall now confront this
model with the linguistic reality of the different stages of the Haskala.
Concerning the first stage, when only a handful of followers of Moses
Mendelssohn rejected the Jdischdeutsch and started speaking
Hochdeutsch, our model will correctly predict that the number of exchange
particles are insufficient to affect German in a perceptible way.
The number of exchange particles increases dramatically when we reach
the first half of the nineteenth century. However, the people changing
language more or less consciously adopted the idea of their original idiom
being an unclean and corrupt version of the target language. Consequently,
by nature their language change consisted of not bringing any influence on
the target language with them. By applying our vague physical model to
this situation, we might say that although the two languages were indeed
closefrom the viewpoints of geography, linguistic similarity and social
contacts, Hochdeutsch was not eligible enough to be seriously
affected.
What happened in the third stage of the Haskala? The following three
case studies represent three possibilities. The first one, the influence of
Yiddish on Hungarian, was actually a case where some elements of stage 2
Haskala were still present. The emancipation of the Jews was closely
related to their assimilation into the Hungarian society, culture and
language. As Jews wished to become an equal part of that society, let us
call this case type e. Each of the many people brings only a very light
quantum of influence, similarly to the very little mass, if any, of the
electron neutrinos. The type mu designates a case when Jews migrated to a
newly created Jewish land, language and culture, namely to modern
Hebrew. Here less people carry possibly more weight , that is why they

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can be paralleled by the heavier muon neutrinos. In the third case, that is
the birth of Esperanto, only one person of Jewish cultural background
wished to transform the entire word, with a total rejection of reference to
any form of Jewishness, at least on a conscious level (type tau, referring to
the probably heaviest type of neutrinos).

2. Three examples of weak interaction

2.1. Type e: Yiddish and Hungarian

Nineteenth century Hungary was situated on the border of Western
European Jewry, affected already by the first two stages of Haskala, and
Eastern European Jewry, which would be reached only by its third phase.
From the second half of the previous century onward, the Jewish
immigration from Bohemia and Moravia had been importing a rather
urbanized population speaking Western Yiddish, or even Jdischdeutsch,
whereas Eastern Yiddish speaking Galician Jews inhabiting Eastern
Hungary represented the westernmost branch of Eastern European Jewry.
Not only were the linguistic features of the two groups strikingly different,
but also their social, economic and cultural background.
In the social and economic fields, Hungary met a first wave of
modernization in the 1830s and 1840s, which is referred to as the reform
age, reaching its peak in the 1848-49 revolution. After the so-called
Compromise with Austria in 1867, the consequence of which had been the
creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with a dualistic system, the most
urbanized parts of the country showed an especially remarkable economic
and cultural growth.
Parallel to the phenomenon of general modernization, the Jewish
population underwent a similar process to the one we have already seen
apropos of the French and German Jewry that had gone through these
social changes fifty years earlier. The second quarter of the century already
witnesses a few Jewish thinkers, mainly rabbis arriving from Germany or
Bohemia, and bringing modern ideals with them. Yet, their effect cannot be
perceived on a larger social scale before the last third of the century.
A few differences should, however, be noted between German and
Hungarian Haskala. First, for the larger society into which Hungarian Jews

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik.

wished to integrate, Enlightenment was not so much the consequence of the

Embourgeoisement, rather its catalyst. Enormous heterogeneities in the
degree of development could be found within the country, both in social, as
well as economic terms. This general picture was paralleled with a
heterogeneous distribution of Eastern and Western type of Jewry. Thus,
even if the most Europeanised Jews may have wished, they could not
disown their pre-Haskala coreligionists living close to them.
Moreover, the modern Hungarian society and culture had to be created
in spite of the Austrian occupation. Social constructs underwent huge
changes, and any group of people identifying themselves as Hungarian
and not Austriancould influence the new shapes of society and culture.
Immigrants from all directions played a fundamental role in laying down
the bases of modern Hungarian urban culture. These are the circumstances
under which most of the Jews chose the Hungarian, rather than the German
or Yiddish culture and language. This decision was far from being evident.
Even most of the orthodoxy adopted Hungarian, though more slowly and
by keeping simultaneously Yiddish.
By putting together the pieces, we obtain an image in which the
dynamically changing Hungarian culture and society is searching new,
modern forms, and is ready to integrate foreign influencesas long as the
carriers identify themselves as new Hungarians. Further, a major part of the
Jewish population is seeking its place in this new society, wants to adopt
the new culture, but is still strongly connectedoften against its willto
the pre-Haskala Jewry living not so far from them. Consequently, we have
both a high eligibility for being influenced on the part of the Hungarian
language, and a large number of exchange particles flowing from Yiddish
to Hungarian.5
What is the outcome of such a situation? Let us consider a few examples
of Yiddishisms in Hungarian. I shall distinguish between three registers that
Yiddishisms entered considerably: the Jewish sociolect of Hungarian, argot
(slang), and standard Hungarian.
The vocabulary of Hungarian speaking Jews unsurprisingly includes a
large number of words specific to domains of Jewish culture and religion.
In some cases only phonological assimilation takes place. The
Hungarian phonological system lacks a short [a], and the short counterpart
of [a:] is [ ]. Therefore the Yiddish word [ra
n ] (Rosh Ha-shana, name
of the Jewish New Year, from Hebrew [r ha ana], i.e. [r j ha: n ] in
standard Hungarian Ashkenazi pronunciation) becomes optionally
[r
n ]. Although the original Yiddish pronunciation [ra
n ] is still

8 Tams Br
possible, the latter emphasizes the foreign origin of the word. An analogous
example is the word barchesz ([b rh s] or [barh s], chala, a special bread
used on Shabbat and holidays), which is clearly from Yiddish origin, but is
unknown outside Hungary; it may have belonged to the vocabulary of
Hungarian Yiddish.
Other words immediately underwent Hungarian morphological processes. In fact, it is a well known phenomenon in many languages of the
world that borrowed verbs, unlike borrowed nouns, cannot be integrated
directly into the vocabulary of a given language. This is the case in words
like lejnol (to read the Torah-scroll in the synagogue), lejnols (the
reading of the Torah-scroll) as well as snder (money given as donation),
snderol (to donate money, especially after the public Torah-reading),
snderols (the act of money donation). In the first case, the Yiddish verb
leyenen (idem)6 was borrowed and one of the two most frequent
denominal verbal suffixes, -l, was added.7 The word lejnols is the nomen
actionis formed with the suffix -s. The expression tfilint lgol (to put on
the phylacteries) originates from German and Yiddish legen, and has gone
through the same processes. For snderol, Hungarian borrows a Yiddish
noun,8 which then serves as the base of further derivations.
The Jewish sociolect of Hungarian includes further lexical items, which
do not belong to the domain of religious practice or Jewish culture. One
such word is unberufn (without calling [the devil]), which should be
added out of superstition to any positive statement that the speaker hopes to
remain true in the future. For instance: My child grows in beauty,
unberufn (Blau -Lng, 1995:66). Nowadays, many people of the generation
born after Word War II and raised already in an almost non-Yiddish
speaking milieu judge this expression as having nothing to do with
superstition, but qualifying a situation as surprisingly good, like You dont
say so! Its incredible! and definitely including also some irony. 9 Others of
that generation say in the same surprising-ironic context: My grandma
would have said: unberufn, even if Grandma had used that word in a
slightly different way. This second meaning of unberufn clearly lacks any
reference to superstition, since the same people would use another
expression (lekopogom) to say touch wood! knock on wood!.
Unlike the previous interjections, the adjective betmt (nice, intelligent,
smart, sweet, lovely) already enters the real syntax of the target
language, even if morphological and phonological changes have not taken
place yetthat happened in the case of lejnol and snderol. This word
consists of the Hebrew root taam (taste), together with the Germanic

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik.

verbal prefix be- and past participle ending t. The resulting word denotes a
person who has some taste: somebody who has some characteristic traits,
who is interesting, who has style and some sense of humour, who is kind,
polite, and so on. It is typically used by Yiddishe mammes describing the
groom they wish their daughter had.
So far, we have seen examples where the language changing population
has kept its original expression to denote something that could be best
expressed using items of their old vocabulary. This Jewish sociolect has
become an organic part of modern Hungarian, acknowledged, and partially
known by many non-Jewish speakers, as well. But do we also find
influences of Yiddish outside of the Jewish sociolect?
The register that is the most likely to be affected under such
circumstances is probably always slang: it is non-conformist by definition,
and, therefore, it is the least conservative. Slang is also the field where
social norms, barriers and older prejudices play the least role. This may be
the reason why Hungarian slang created in the nineteenth century borrowed
so much from the languages of two socially marginal groups: the Gipsy
(Roma) languages and Yiddish. In contemporary Hungarian slang, one can
find well-known words from Yiddish origin such as: kser (kosher,
meaning good in slang); tr (bad, crappy, grotty, from Hebrew -YiddishHungarian trfli ritually unclean, non kosher food); majr (fear, dread,
rabbit fever, from Hebrew mora fear > Ashkenazi [m yr
] > Yiddish
moyre [m
yr  ] > Hungarian [m jr  :]), further derived to majrzik (to fear,
to be afraid of sg.); szajr (swag, loot, hot stuff, from Hebrew sehora

 et al., 1967-76). An interesting
goods, merchandise), and so on (
construction is stikban, meaning in the sly, in secret, quitely. Its origin is
the Aramaic-Hebrew noun [ tika] remaining silent, which receives a
Hungarian inessive case ending, meaning in.
Through slang, some of the Yiddish words have then infiltrated into the
standard language and become quasi-standard. Thus, the word haverfrom
the Hebrew [ aver] friendis used nowadays as an informal synonym
for a good acquaintance, a friend. Similarly, dafke means in spoken
Hungarian For all that! Only out of spite!. Furthermore, there are words
of Yiddish origin which did not enter Hungarian through the slang, but
through cultural interaction: macesz (matzo, unleavened bread, from
Hebrew matzot, plural form of matza; its ending clearly shows that the
word arrived to Hungarian through Yiddish) or slet (tsholent, a typically
Hungarian Jewish bean dish, popular among non-Jews, too).10

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To summarize, the high amount of exchange particles, that is, Jewish
people gradually changing their language from Yiddish to Hungarian, has
affected the target language in three manners. One of them has been the
creation of a special Jewish sociolect. This was not a secret language
though, and non-Jews have borrowed quite a few expressions. This fact led
to the second manner of influence, namely to the high amount of Yiddish
words entering the slang. Some of these words have infiltrated even into the
relatively more informal registers of the standard language. The third
manner is cultural interaction: the exchange of cultural goodsfor instance
in the field of gastronomyinevitably has resulted the exchange of the
vocabulary designating those goods.
2.2. Type : Yiddish and Modern Hebrew
The fruit of Western European Haskala in the field of science was the birth
of Wissenschaft des Judentums. The Jewish scholars belonging to this
group aimed to introduce modern approaches when dealing with traditional
texts, Jewish history, and so forth. Their approach contrasted traditional
rabbinical activity the same way as the romanticist cantorial compositions
by Salomon Sulzer and Louis Lewandowski contrasted traditional synagogal
music: modernists aimed to produce cultural goods that were esteemed by
the modern society, both by Jews and the recipient country. A further
motivation of the Wissenschaft des Judentums was to expose the values of
post-Biblical Jewish culture, and to present them as an organic part of
universal culture: by emancipating Jewish past, they hoped to be also
emancipated by contemporary society.
This background illuminates why early Haskala honoured so much
Hebrewthe language of the contribution par excellence of the Jewish
nation to universal culture, which is the Hebrew Bible, and a language that
had been long studied by Christian Hebraists. And also why Yiddish, the
supposedly jargon of the uneducated Jews and a corrupt version of German,
was so much scorned in the same time.
Although the goal of the earlier phases of Haskala was to promote the
literary language of the recipient country among Jews, that is practically
Hochdeutsch, and Hebrew was principally only the object of scholarly
study, still some attempts were made to use the language in modern
domains, at least for some restricted purposes. After a few pioneering
experiments to establish Hebrew newspapers in the middle of the

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik. 11

eighteenth century, the Hebrew literary quarterly Ha-Meassef appeared as

early as 1784 (Senz-Badillos, 1993:267).
However, it was not before the middle of the next century, when
Haskala reached Russia, that the need of reviving the Hebrew language was
really articulated. As already discussed, the major reasons for this switch
were that the Jewish population did not see the underdeveloped
surrounding society as a model to which they wanted to assimilate; the
Russian society and policy did not show any real sign of wanting to
emancipate and integrate Jews, either; furthermore, the huge Jewish
population reached the critical mass required to develop something in itself.
The summation of these factors led to the idea of seeing Jewry as separate a
nation in its modern sense. A further factor reinforcing Jewish national
feelings both in Eastern and Western Europe was the emergence of modern
political anti-Semitism in the 1870s in the West, accompanied by events
such as the huge Russian pogroms in 1881, the blood libel of Tiszaeszlr,
Hungary (1882-3) or the Dreyfus-affair in France (starting in 1894).
The claims following from this idea were that the Jewish nation has the
right to have a countryin Palestine or elsewhere, but at least it should
receive some local autonomy, and also that the Jewish nation must have
its own national language. The two major candidates for the Jewish
national language were Yiddish and Hebrew, although German was not out
of the competition, either (cf. e.g. Shur 1979:VII-VIII).
The first wave of attempts to revive Hebrew consisted mainly of purists,
seeing Biblical Hebrew as the most precious layer of the language: some of
them went so far that they preferred to create very complicated expressions
to designate modern concepts, rather than using non-Biblical vocabulary.
The fruits of this early period are among others the first regular Hebrew
weekly, Ha-Maggid (1856), the first modern play by D. Zamoscz (1851),
novels by A. Mapu, as well as works of S. J. Abramowitsch (Mendele
Moykher Seforim), who can be considered one of the founders of both
modern Hebrew and modern Yiddish literature.
The real upswing was observable in the last quarter of the century,
especially after the 1881 pogroms, and when Haskala had reached the
broadest masses, as well. Traditionally, the publication of Eliezer BenYehudas article in 1879 entitled A burning question is considered to be
the opening of the new era (Senz-Badillos, 1993:269). Ben-Yehuda (18581922) has been portrayed as the hero of the revival: he moved to Jerusalem
in 1881, where he forced himself and his family to speak Hebrew. To speak
a language, that is to produce everyday, spontaneous sentences in real -

12 Tams Br
time, on a language that had been m ostly used for writing and reading and
only in restricted domains. His son, Ithamar (1882-1943), was the first
person after millennia who grew up in an exclusively Hebrew-speaking
environment. Ben-Yehuda constantly introduced new words designating
weekday concepts, while he was editing a newspaper and working on his
monumental Thesaurus, which incorporated material from ancient and
medieval literature. In 1890, he founded the Vaad ha-Lashon (Language
Committee), the forerunner of the Hebrew Language Academy, hereby
creating a quasi-official institution for language planning.
However, Shur (1979) has argued against an overestimation of BenYehudas role. Out of Fishmans five stages of language planning (1. code
selection; 2. ideologization of the choice; 3. codification; 4. elaboration and
modernization; 5. standardization, i.e. the acceptance by the community),
Ben-Yehuda was salient especially in codification and elaboration, as well
as in vitalization, which was also necessary under the given circumstances.
But for socio-political reasons, he had no much influence on the initial
language choice and its ideologization, as well as on the final acceptance of
the codified and elaborated standard.
It is clear that Yiddish was the mother tongue, or one of the main
languages for a major fraction of the members of the Vaad ha -Lashon,
including Ben-Yehuda himself. Moreover, people with Yiddish as first
language represented an important part of the speaker community of the
old-new tongue in the first half of the twentieth century. Although Yiddish
was not scorned anymore, as it had been a century before, but was not
considered as a major source for language reform, either. Especially for the
later generations, Yiddish would symbolize the Diaspora left behind by the
Zionist movement.
Yiddish speaking ex change particles dominated the community, much
more than in the Hungarian case. Yet, a very conscious ideology required
changing the previous ethnic language to the old-new national language,
especially after the 1913-14 Language Quarrel, wherein the defenders of
Hebrew defeated those of German and Yiddish (Shur 1979:VII-VIII, X).
This ideology was actively present in almost each and every individual who
had chosen to move to the Land of Israel in a given periodcontrary to the
European case, where ideology of changing the language was explicit only
in the cultural elite. Further, the language change was not slow and gradual,
but drastic in the life of the people emigrating to Palestine, combined with a
simultaneous radical change in geographical location, social structure and
lifestyle. What phenomena would this constellation involve?

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik. 13

Yiddish influence on Modern Hebrew vocabulary has been investigated

byamong othersHaim Blanc. For instance, the Modern Hebrew
interjection davka (approx. necessarily, for all that) is clearly a
Hebraisation of Yiddish dafke, of Hebrew origin itself, and mentioned also
in relation with Hungarian. Similarly, kumzitz get-together, picnic,
campfire undoubtedly originates from the Yidd ish expression come [and]
sit down!, since only in Yiddish do we find [u] in the verb to come.
However, the expression was probably coined in Hebrew, as standard
Yiddish dictionaries do not mention it. One can easily imagine the early
pioneers sitting around a campfire in the first kibbutzim, chatting in a
mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew, and inviting their comrades to join them.
Nissan Netzer (1988) analyses the use of the Modern Hebrew verb
firgen and the corresponding de-verbal noun firgun. Officially, the word is
still not considered to belong to the language, for it is not attested in any
dictionary of Hebrew that I know. Definitions for this word I have found on
the Internet are: the ability to allow someone else to enjoy if his or her
enjoyment does not hurt one, and to treat favourably, with equanimity, to
bear no grudge or jealousy against somebody, and also to be delighted at
the success of the other. The word can be traced back to Yiddish farginen
not begrudge, not envy, indulge. As Netz er has demonstrated, there is a
linguistic gap in Hebrew, for the expressions darash et tovato shel or lo
hayta eno tsara be- that should bear that meaning are cumbersome,
circuitous, overly sophisticated in style and seems to cloud the true
linguistic message. Therefore, they were not accepted by the linguistic
community. When a leading Hebrew linguistics professor used the Yiddish
equivalent in the early sixties, the situation made the listeners of an
academic lecture smile, because in that time the Yiddishism was considered
to be a folk idiom that would finally withdraw in favour of a real Hebrew
expression. However, firgen would have become more and more accepted
in daily conversation and even in journalistic writings by the eighties.11
This example has led us to the issue of the sociolinguistic status of
Yiddish words in Modern Hebrew. Ora Schwarzwald (1995) shows that the
vocabulary of the most used classical texts, such as the Hebrew Bible and
liturgy, has become the base of Modern Hebrew, in all its registers.
Furthermore, loanwords of European languages are also used both in
formal and non-formal language. However, from less esteemed languages,
such as Jewish languages (e.g. Yiddish and Ladino), as well as Arabic,
words would infiltrate primarily into lower registers and everyday informal
speech.

14 Tams Br
For instance, chevre friends is used mainly when addressing
informally a group of people, and it is the borrowing of the similar word in
Yiddish (khevre gang, bunch of friends, society). The latter obvi ously
comes from Hebrew chevra society, company, gathering, whose root is
chaver friend, a well -known word for speakers of Hungarian and Dutch
(gabber), too. The originally Hebrew word thus arrived back to Modern
Hebrew, but keeping the phonological traces of its trajectory. Also note the
minor shifts in the semantics during the two borrowings.
Another example for Yiddish influence on informal speech is the use of
the -le diminutive suffix: abale from aba dad, Sarale little Sarah,
Chanale little Hanah, and so forth. Observe that the suffix follows the
Hebrew word, whereas in Yiddish one would have Sorele and Chanele.
Thus, the influence of Yiddish on Modern Hebrew is indeed similar to
its influence on Hungarian: lower registers and informal speech constitute
one of the canals through which this interaction takes place. To make the
similarity even more prominent, we can point to two further canals, shared
by the Modern Hebrew case and the Hungarian case. Similarly to
Hungarian, the designation of goods of general culture, such as food names
(beygelach bagels or pretzel) represent a domain for word borrowings.
Moreover, Yiddish loan words, or Hebrew words with a Yiddish or
Ashkenazi pronunciation are likely to appear in religious vocabulary (e.g.
rebe Chasidic charismatic leader); typically in the sociolect of religious
groups (especially within the ultra-orthodox society), and in the language
used by secular Israelis to mock the stereotypically Yiddish-speaking ultraorthodox Jews (e.g. dos an ultra-orthodox person, from Hebrew dat
religion; vus-vus-im the Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox Jews, who often say
Vus? Vus? What? What?, followed by the Hebrew plural ending -im).
2.3. Type : Yiddish and Esperanto
Esperanto emerged in the very same context as Modern Hebrew. Its creator,
Lazar Ludwik Zamenhof (1859-1917), was born one year after Eliezer BenYehuda, similarly from a Jewish family living in a small Lithuanian town,
whose population was composed of Russian, Polish and Lithuanian people,
but was dominated by a Jewish majority. The Litvak (Lithuanian-Jewish)
Haskala background of both men encouraged traditional Jewish education
combined with studies in a secular Gymnasium; both of them went on to
study medicine. Following the 1881 wave of pogroms, in the year in which

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik. 15

Ben-Yehuda moved to Jerusalem, Zamenhof published an article calling for

mass emigration to a Jewish homeland. For a few years, he became one of
the first activists of the early Zionist movement Hovevei Tzion (Lovers of
Zion). Berdiche vsky (1986) points out the similarities even in the
mentality and the physical appearance of Zamenhof and Ben-Yehuda.
Nevertheless, two key differences should be pointed out. The first one is
Zamenhofs pragmatism. In his 1881 article, Zamenhof imagined th e
Jewish homeland to be in the western part of the United States, a relatively
unsettled area those days, which would have arisen much less sensibility
from all sides. Furthermore, Zamenhof shared the scepticism of many of his
contemporaries in the feasibility to revive the Hebrew language. According
to the anecdote, Theodor Herzl said once that he could not buy even a train
ticket in Hebrew. Leading Jewish writers, such as Mendele Moykher
Seforim, oscillated between writing in Yiddish and in Hebrew; both of
these languages called for the establishment of a modern, secular literary
tongue. The young and pragmatic Zamenhof chose to reform Yiddish, the
language with millions of native speakers; whereas the first native speaker
of Modern Hebrew, the son of Ben-Yehuda was not born yet.
In his early years, Zamenhof wrote a comprehensive Yiddish grammar
(completed in 1879, partially published in 1909 in the Vilna Journal, Lebn
un Vissenschaft, and fully published only in 1982). He argued for the
modernization of the language and fought for the use of the Latin alphabet,
instead of the Hebrew one. How is it possible then that a few years later
Zamenhof changed his mind, and switched to Esperanto (1887)?
Here comes the second key difference into the picture. Ben-Yehuda was
sent by his orthodox family to a yeshiva (traditional school teaching mainly
the Talmud), where one of the rabbis introduced him secretly into the
revolutionary ideas of the Haskala. On the contrary, Zamenhofs father and
grandfather were enlightened high-school teachers of Western languages
(French and German). For him, being Jewish probably meant a universal
mission to make the world a better place for the whole humankind. This
idea originates from eighteenth century German Haskala philosophers
claiming that Judaism is the purest embodiment so-far existing of the
universal moral and of the faith of the Pure Reason; even today a major part
of Jews worldwide perceive Judaism this way.
Zamenhof did not therefore content himself with the goal of creating a
Jewish national language. For him, similarly to his semi-secularised
coreligionists joining the socialist movement in the same decades, unifying
the human race and building a new word order presented the solution for

16 Tams Br
among othersthe problems of the oppressed Eastern European Jewry.
And also the other way around: the secular messianic idea of the unification
of the dispersed and oppressed Jews into a Jewish nation was just one step
behind from the secular messianic idea of the unification of the whole
mankind into a supra-national unit. This explains not only the motivations
of Zamenhof himself, but also why Jews played such an important role in
the pre-World War II Esperanto movement in Central and Eastern Europe
(Berdichevsky, 1986:60). Whereas socialists fought for a social-economic
liberation of the oppressed, Zamenhof spoke about the liberation of the
humans from the cultural and linguistic barriers. It is not a coincidence that
the twentieth century history of the Esperantist movement was so much
intermingled with the one of the socialist movements.
Zamenhofs initiative was to create a language that would be equally
distant from and equally close to each ethnic language, thus each human
being would have equal chance using this bridge connecting cultures and
people. Hence Zamenhof created a vocabulary and a grammar using
elements of languages he knew: Russian (the language his father spoke
home and the language of his high-school), German and French (the
languages his father and grandfather were teachers of), Polish (the language
of his non-Jewish fellow children), Latin and Greek (from high-school), as
well as English and Italian. Note that the resulting language, similarly to
most artificial languages, is inherently European and Indo-European in its
character, though extremely simplified.
However, one should not forget that Zamenhofs native tongue was
Yiddish, this was the language he used with his school mates in the Jewish
primary school (kheyder, cf. Piron, 1984), and most of his life he kept
contact with circles where Yiddish was alive. So one would wonder why
Yiddish is not mentioned overtly among the source languages of Esperanto.
Seeing Zamenhofs former devotion for the Jewish sake and the Yiddish
language, as well as his later remark that Yiddish is a language similar to
any other (in Homo Sum, 1901, cf. Piron (1984:17) and Berdichevsky
(1986:70)), the possibility that he despised the corrupt version of German
or that he felt shame at his Yiddish origins, are out of question.
The challenging task now is to find at least covert influences of Yiddish
on Esperanto.
As strange as it may sound, a considerable literature has been devoted to
etymology within Esperanto linguistics. One of the biggest mysteries is the
morpheme edz. As a root, it means married person (edzo husband;
edzino wife, by adding the feminine suffix -in-). While as a suffix, it turns

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik. 17

the words meaning into the wife or husband of the stem: lavistino washer woman vs. lavistinedzo washerwomans housband; doktoro doctor vs.
doktoredzino doctors wife. Hungarian Esperantists have tried to use this
suffix to translate the Hungarian suffix -n (wife of, e.g.: Dekn wife
of Dek, Mrs. Dek; cf. Goldin (1982:28)). The phonemic content of the
morpheme is not similar to any word with related meaning in any of the
languages that Zamenhof might have taken into consideration.
Zamenhof himself wrote in a letter to mile Boirac that the morpheme
was the result of backformation, and that originally it was a bound form
(Goldin, 1982:22f). Boirac suggested in 1913 the following reconstruction:
if the German Kronprinz (heir apparent) became kronprinco in Esperanto,
while Kronprinzessin (wife of a crown prince, note the double feminine
ending: the French feminine suffix -esse is followed by the Germanic
feminine -in) turns to kronprincedzino, then the ending -edzin- can be
identified as a woman legally bound to a man. By removing the feminine
suffix -in-, we obtain the morpheme -edz-. Goldin adds to this theory that
the morphemes es and ec had already been used with other meanings, that
is why the surprising [dz] combination appeared. Summarizing, the
etymology of the Esperanto morpheme edz would be the French feminine
ending -esse, which had been reanalysed with a different meaning due to
the additional feminine suffix in German.
However, this is not the end of the story. Other alternatives have been
also proposed. Waringhien and others have brought forward the idea that
the word serving as the base of backformation was the Yiddish word
rebetsin (wife of a rabbi). In fact, this word can be reanalysed as
reb+edz+in, and we obtain the edz morpheme using the same logic as
above. Goldins counterargument that the Yiddish word is actually rebetsn
with a syllabic [n] is not at all convincing: old Yiddish spelling often uses
the letter yod to designate a schwa, or even more the syllabicity of an [n],
similarly to the e in German spelling, like in wissen. Consequently, I can
indeed accept the idea that a pre-YIVO spelling rebetsin was in the mind of
Zamenhof.
Piron (1984) adds further cases of possible Yiddish influence. In words
taken from German, the affricate [pf] always changes to [f]: German pfeifen
to whistle became Esperanto fajfi. This coincides with Yiddish fayfn.
Though, one is not compelled to point to Yiddish as the origin of this word:
the reason can simply be that the affricate [pf] is too typical to German, not
occurring in any other languages that served officially as examples for
Zamenhof. In other words, [pf] was not seen as universal enough. But what

18 Tams Br
about the consonant clusters [ m], [ p], [ t], which are also characteristic
solely to German (and to Yiddish)? May the solution be that while [pf]
becomes [f] in Yiddish, these clusters are unchanged; therefore, Zamenhof
felt less discomfort with regard to the latter clusters than with regard to [pf]
which truly occurs exclusively in German? I do not believe that we can do
more than speculate about the different unconscious factors acting within a
person more than a hundred years ago. The only claim we can make is that
some of these factors must have been related to Yiddish, as expected from
the fact that Yiddish was one of the major tongues of Zamenhof.
In the field of semantics, Piron brings the differentiation in Esperanto
between landa (national, related to a given country, adjective formed
from lando country) as opposed to nacia (national, related to a given
nation, adjective from nacio nation). This differentiation exists in
Yiddish (landish and natsional), but not in any other languages that
Zamenhof might have taken into consideration. Piron also argues against
the possible claim that this is not a Yiddish influence, rather an inner
development related to the inner logic of Esperanto.
The most evident example of Piron is Esperanto superjaro leap year, a
compound of super on and jaro year. No known language uses the
preposition on or above to express this concept. However, Yiddish has
iberyor for leap year, from Hebrew ibbur (making pregnant), the term
used in rabbinic literature for intercalating an extra month and making the
year a leap year (e.g. Tosefta Sanhedrin 2:1-7). On the other hand, iber also
means above in Yiddish, which explains the strange expression in
Esperanto. I do not know if Zamenhof realized that the Yiddish expression
iberyor is not related to German ber, but this is probably not relevant.
Let us summarize this section. Yiddish influence on Esperanto is a case
where there is only one exchange particlein the first order approximation,
at least, since we have not dealt with the possible influences related to the
numerous later speakers of Esperanto of Yiddish background. Though, this
one particle had a huge impact on the language for a very obvious reason.
Even if he did not overtly acknowledge that Yiddish had played a role in
creating Esperanto, it is possible to discover theeither consciously hidden
or unconscioustraces of Yiddish.
Did Zamenhof want to deny that he had also used Yiddish, as a building
block of Esperanto? Perhaps because his goal was indeed to create a
universal, supra-national language, and not the language of the Jewish
nation? Or, alternatively, was this influence unconscious? I do not dare to
give an answer.

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik. 19

3. Conclusion
In linguistics, we could define weak interaction as an interaction that is not
overtly acknowledged. No one would deny the influence of the Frenchspeaking ruling class on medieval English, or the impact of the Slavic
neighbours on Hungarian. But sometimes, conscious factors hide the effect.
Yet, weak interactions are as crucial for the development of a language, as
the nuclear processes emitting neutrinos in the core of the Sun that produce
the energy which is vital for us.
We have seen three cases of week interaction between languages. In
fact, all three stories were about the formative phase of a new or
modernized language, in the midst of the late nineteenth century Eastern
Europe Jewry. In the cases of Yiddish influencing Hungarian and Modern
Hebrew, the number of exchange particl es, that is, the amount of initially
Yiddish-speaking people joining the new language community, were
extremely high: roughly one tenth of the Hungarian speaking population in
nineteenth century Hungary, and probably above 50% of the Jews living in
early twentieth century Palestine. Nonetheless, in both cases we encounter
an ideology promoting the new language and disfavouring Yiddish.
Because the level of consciousness of this ideology seems to be
inversely proportional to the ratio of exchange particle sstronger in
Palestine than in Hungary, the two factors extinguish each other, and we
find similar phenomena. For instance, Yiddish has affected first and
foremost lower registers, which are less censored by society; therefrom it
infiltrates into informal standard language. Additional trends are Yiddish
words entering specific domains, such as gastronomy or Jewish religious
practice. Although it is essential to note that not all concepts that are new in
the target culture are expressed by their original Yiddish word: many new
expressions in these domains have been coined in Hungarian and Modern
Hebrew, and accepted by the language community.
The third case that we have examined is different. Zamenhof was a
single person, but as the creator of Esperanto, he had an enormous
influence on the new language. The influence of Yiddish was again weak in
the sense that it was not overtly admitted; however, we could present
examples where the native tongue of Zamenhof influenced the new
language. We could have cited, as the articles mentioned had done,
numerous further instances where the influence of Yiddish cannot be
proven directly, the given phenomenon could have been taken from other

20 Tams Br
languages, as well; however, one can hypothesize that Yiddish played
consciously or unconsciouslya reinforcing role in Zamenhofs decisions.
I do hope that I have been able to prove to the reader that seemingly
very remote fields, such as physics, social history and linguistics, can be
interconnected, at least for the sake of a thought experiment. Furthermore,
exchange particles in the field of science, and Tjeerd are certainly among
them, have hopefully brought at least some weak interaction among the
different disciplines.

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik. 21

Notes
(Your endnotes should automatically appear below this paragraph. Feel
free to edit them, but do not delete this paragraph or try to remove the line
which follows it!)
1

According to http://cupp.oulu.fi/neutrino/nd-mass.html, the

mass of the electron neutrino (e) is less than 2.2 eV, the mass of the muon
neutrino () does not exceed 170 keV, while the mass of the tau neutrino ()
is reported to be bellow 15.5 MeV. For the sake of comparison, the mass of an
electron is 511 keV, while the mass of a proton is almost 940 MeV.
Physical phenomena are thought to be reducible to four fundamental forces.
These are gravity, electromagnetism, weak interaction and strong interaction.
The last two play a role in sub-atomic physics.
The photons (particles of the light) are the exchange particles for the
electromagnetic interaction; the hypothetical gravitons should transmit gravitation; in the case of the weak interaction, the W +, W - and Z vector bosons play
that role; whereas the strong interaction is mediated by pions.
Targumim (plural of targum) are the Jewish Aramaic versions of the Hebrew
Bible from the late antiquity, including also many commentaries beside the
pure translation. The same way as late antiquity Jews created the commented
translation of the Holy Scriptures to their native tongue and using their way of
thinking, Moses Mendelssohn expected his version of the Bible to fit the
modern way of thinking and the correct language of its future readers.
Obviously, the Biur should first have to fulfil its previous task, namely to teach
the modern way of thinking and the correct tongue to the first generation of
its readers. Interestingly enough, script was not such a major issue for Mendelssohn as language purity, thus he wrote Hochdeutsch in Hebrew characters, in
order to better disseminate his work among the Jewish population.
I assume that the formative phase of modern Dutch society and culture in the
17th and 18th century is comparable to that of 19th century Hungary; even more
is so the role of Jewry in both countries, as a group which was simultaneously
integrating into the new society and also forming it. In both cases, the presence
of the continuous spectrum from the pre-Haskala Yid to the self-modernizing
Israelite led to a gradual, though determined giving up of the Yiddish language.
This socio-historical parallelism could partially explain why phenomena of
Yiddish influence on Dutch are often similar to that on Hungarian.
Concerning Dutch-Jewish linguistic interactions, readers interested in Jewish
aspects of Papiamentu, a creole language spoken in the Netherlands Antilles,
are referred to Richard E. Woods article in Jewish Language Review 3
(1983):15-18.

22 Tams Br

The etymology of the Yiddish word itself is also interesting. The origin is the
late Latin or Old French root [l j] to read (cf. to Latin lego, legere, modern
French je lis, lire), which was borrowed by the Jews living in early medieval
Western Europe. The latter would then change their language to Old High
German, the ancestor of Yiddish. At some point, the meaning of the Old French
word was restricted to the public reading of the Torah-scroll in the synagogue.
Compare to s ski > sel to ski,
fire > tzel to fire; also: printel to
print with a computer printer. I t is extremely surprising that the word lejnol
does not follow vowel harmony, one would expect *lejnel. Even though the [ ]
sound can be transparent for vowel harmony, this fact is not enough to explain
the word lejnol. Probably the dialectal Yiddish laynen was originally borrowed,
and this form served as the base for word formation, before the official Yiddish
form leynen influenced the Hungarian word. Some people still say ljnol.
When being called to the Torah during the public reading, one recites a
blessing, the text of which says: He Who blessed our forefathers Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, may He bless [the name of the person] because he has come up
to the Torah / who has promised to contribute to charity on behalf of etc.
The part of the text who has promised sounds in the Ashkenazi pronunciation
[mi nodar]. This is most probably the source of the word snder, after vowel
in the unstressed last syllable has become a schwa, a process that is crucial for
understanding the Yiddishization of Hebrew words. The exciting part of the
story is that the proclitic [ ] (that) was kept together with the following finite
verbal form ([nadar] he promised), and they were reanalysed as one word.
When I asked people about the meaning of unberufn on the mailing list
2nd-Generation-Jews-Hungary@yahoogroups.com,
somebody
reported that her non-Jewish grandmother also used to say unberufn with a
similar meaning.
Other Hungarian words of Hebrew origin do not come from Yiddish, as shown
by their non-Askenazi pronunciation: Tra ([to:r ] Torah, as opposed to its
Yiddish counterpart Toyre) or rabbi (and not rov or rebe). Words like behemt
(big hulking fellow), originally from Biblical Hebrew behema (cattle, plural:
behemot; appearing also as a proper name both in Jewish and in Christian
mythology) should be rather traced back to Christian Biblical tradition.
Note, that the word has kept its original word initial [f], without transforming it
into [p], which would have been predicted by Hebrew phonology. Although
this is a remarkable fact for Netzer, it turns out that almost no word borrowed
by Modern Hebrew would change its initial [f] to [p]. Even not verbs that have
had to undergo morpho-phonological processes (e.g. fibrek from English to
fabricate). The only exception I have found in dictionaries is the colloquial
form pilosofiya for filosofiya philosophy, as well as the verb formed from it,
pilsef to philosophise. Furthermore, it can be argued that pilosofiya is not even

10

11

Hiba! A stlus nem ltezik. 23

a modern borrowing. The only reason why one would still expect firgen to
satisfy the constraints of Hebrew phonology is that the foreign language form is
not known anymore to a major part of the speakers community, thus no
external factor would reinforce the initial [f]. On the other hand, one may claim
that [p] and [f] should be considered as distinct phonemes in Modern Hebrew,
even if no proposed minimal pair that I know of is really convincing.

24 Tams Br
(Your endnotes should automatically appear on the previous page. Please
do not change or delete this paragraph. It will be removed by the editors.)

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